Innovative tips and tricks to help you get flat abs, lose body fat, fight aging & live a healthier life. I'll even cover controversial topics that mainstream health "experts" don't understand about nutrition...the TRUTH about cholesterol & saturated fat, carbs, protein, and even superfoods you may have never heard of!

Friday

Is "paleo" the healthiest human diet? (controversial)

The hottest thing in nutrition over the last few years is the "Paleo"
style of eating (aka, Paleolithic nutrition). In some ways, it's a
simple concept, and it's common sense... eat a similar hunter-gatherer
diet like our ancestors did for over 1.9 Million years, and since this
is the diet that the human digestive system is most adapted to during
99% of our existence, good health will follow, and getting a lean body
becomes easier.

Some paleo authors though forbid even tiny
amounts of grains and dairy in their recommendations, while other
mainstream health authors and experts just aren't convinced yet (or
haven't been explained the science yet) that whole grains can possibly
be bad for you in any way.

My thought on this is that not all
grains are necessarily bad for you, but some are a LOT worse than
others... this is where I see "paleo" nutrition in a slightly different
light than some very strict Paleo authors that advise to 100% eliminate
ALL grains. I don't quite see it that way.

A couple things that I keep in mind in terms of deciding on the healthiest paleolithic nutrition plan:

1.
For people that are extremely active such as long distance bikers,
runners, and athletes that do intense activity for several hours per
day, the extra calories from starch that grains give can be useful. The
extra calories and carbs from grains can also be useful to those looking
to build muscle mass.

However, there's no reason at all that these types of people can't fuel their carb needs with potatoes, sweet potatoes, fruit, squash, quinoa, and other non-grain carb sources,
and still get the calories and carbs they need without getting all of
the gluten and other problematic anti-nutrients that are in many popular
grains.

2.Some grains are worse than others.
For example, rice and oats still have anti-nutrients, but have a lot
less anti-nutrients than wheat does. Rice and oats also don't contain
gluten (unless they contain traces from processing machines that also
processed wheat or barley), and as you know, chronic gluten intake can
irritate the gut and cause internal inflammation in a large majority of
us, even if we're not Celiac.

This means that rice and oats are
more "neutral" than wheat is, and if you're extremely active and burn
boatloads of calories with hours of exercise each day, then rice and
oats can be a reasonable source of calories, although still not
necessarily the "best" carb source per se.

However, if you're an
average person that exercises a couple days a week, and not daily for
hours each day, there's really no need for the extra calories and carbs
that even "neutral" grains provide.

3. It's important to know that grains are NOT "essential" to the human diet
in any way. After all, before agriculture started approx 10,000 years
ago, grains were just a very tiny % of the human diet, dating back
almost 2 Million years.

Currently, it's estimated that the
average modern day person obtains 67% of their total calories come from
only 3 foods -- wheat, corn, and soy and their derivatives.

However,
ancient paleolithic humans most likely only consumed about 1 or 2% of
their total calories from wild grains that they could have gathered.
Mass produced grains to make bread, baked goods, and pasta that are
modern day staples simply didn't exist back then.

This means that for 99% of human existence,
humans only ate grains in a very tiny fraction of their total calories,
and for the last 1% of human existence, we now eat 67% of our total
calories from wheat, corn, and soy alone (although technically, soy is
not a grain...it's a legume, but soy has it's own health issues as well).

Ancient
paleolithic humans were very active hunting and gathering each day (and
probably fighting off predators too in most locations!), yet somehow us
humans managed to "fuel our bodies" for almost 2 Million years without
the need for large amounts of grains like modern day athletes resort to
as the go-to carb source.

Although I'm not personally a competing
athlete in anything, I'm a very active skier, mountain biker, hiker,
and weight lifter. But I don't fuel my body on grains, and I don't
necessarily fuel my body on primarily carbohydrates either. And I feel
amazing every single day!

I tend to prefer to fuel my body
primarily from healthy fats like avocados, nuts, egg yolks, seeds, olive
oil, coconut oil, and grass-fed butter and cream. But I still also
fuel my body with small to moderate amounts of carbs each day from
eating loads of veggies, raw honey in my morning or afternoon tea, maybe
a few potatoes or sweet potatoes each week, squash, and one or two
pieces of fruit a day. This type of plan replicates the ancient
paleolithic hunter-gatherer diet much more closely than these modern
plans loaded with grains at every meal.

I'm sure we'll talk more about this topic in upcoming newsletters, but let's look at the big picture here...

The
way I see it is that you can probably find a lot of examples of people
you know that eat a lot of grains and yet remain lean, and seemingly
healthy. This doesn't mean that gluten and other anti-nutrients they
are consuming daily aren't causing at least some form of moderate
internal inflammation, blood sugar problems, or minor digestive problems
though in many of these grain-eaters.

I personally don't avoid
grains altogether, but I would say that I only eat grains about 1 day
per week, and I try to get variety when I do instead of only one type of
grain, so that I'm not always consuming the same types of
anti-nutrients which might affect specific minerals from being absorbed
in the body. This can lead to some mineral deficiency with
over-consumption of certain grains too often.

With all of this
said, I think the nutrition community is starting to become more acutely
aware of some of the health problems of eating too much grains,
specifically modern-day hybridized wheat and GM corn (which is 90% of
the corn products in the store). The articles below will help you
explore some of the problems that scientists are finding with too much
wheat and corn intake: